Posts by Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar

2453 posts

https://www.brentozar.com

I make Microsoft SQL Server go faster. I love teaching, travel, cars, and laughing. I'm based out of Las Vegas. He/him.

Why Developers Should Consider Microsoft SQL Server

Last Updated March 22, 2017

Brent Ozar

Development

I know, I know, I’m biased because I’m a SQL Server guy. Hear me out, though, and I’ll give you both sides. The Good It’s stable and mature. SQL Server has been out for forever, so it’s easy to find blogs, videos, books, and people who can help. Everything integrates with it. Visual Studio, reporting…

Registration is Open for GroupBy.org’s April Free Conference

Last Updated March 18, 2017

Brent Ozar

GroupBy Conference

GroupBy.org is our community training initiative where your votes pick the session lineup. Here’s the lineup you chose for GroupBy April: Friday, April 21: 8AM Eastern – How to Use Parameters Like a Pro and Boost Performance by Guy Glantser 10AM – Introducing the SQL Server 2016 Query Store by Enrico van de Laar Noon – Worst Practices…

Announcing Google Managed PostgreSQL (and why SQL Server DBAs should care)

Last Updated March 9, 2017

Brent Ozar

Google Compute Engine

You’ll notice that we’ve been blogging and writing a lot about Google here this week. I gotta tell you – it’s totally bizarre sitting in a Google Cloud Next conference session in San Francisco, watching presenters using Macs, coding with Visual Studio Code, demonstrating SQL Server. I even talked to a SQL Server DBA attendee yesterday…

New White Paper: How to Build an Always On Availability Group in Google Compute Engine

Last Updated March 17, 2017

Brent Ozar

Always On Availability Groups, Google Compute Engine, SQL Server

You’re a database administrator, Windows admin, or developer. You want to build a Microsoft SQL Server environment that’s highly available, and you’ve chosen to use Always On Availability Groups. Our newest white paper – download In this white paper we built with Google, we’ll show you: How to build your first Availability Group in Google…

4 Free Things to Do with a Slow SQL Server

Last Updated February 28, 2017

Brent Ozar

Processes and Practices, Wait Stats

Step 1. Run sp_Blitz and look for urgent warnings. sp_Blitz is one of the free scripts in our First Responder Kit. Just open the sp_Blitz.sql, run that to create the stored procedure, and type: Transact-SQL sp_Blitz 1 sp_Blitz It returns a prioritized list of things that are wrong, broken, or dangerous about your SQL Server. Focus on…

What Kinds of Raises do DBAs Get?

Last Updated December 9, 2017

Brent Ozar

Professional Development, Salary

I took the data from the 2017 Data Professional Salary Survey, and filtered just for database administrators in the United States. Then, I pivoted it on the two experience questions. First, we’ll cover database experience, and then we’ll cover job experience. How many years of experience do you have with this database? I stopped the analysis at…

Vote Now to Pick the #GroupBy April Lineup

Last Updated February 28, 2017

Brent Ozar

GroupBy Conference

GroupBy.org is a new free online conference by the community, for the community. You get to pick the session lineup. Yes, you. We just run whatever you wanna see. Here’s how to do vote: Open one browser with the list of abstracts for details Open another browser with the GroupBy voting page If you haven’t…

Let’s Corrupt a Database Together, Part 2: Nonclustered Indexes

Last Updated April 5, 2017

Brent Ozar

CHECKDB and Corruption

In part 1, I showed you how to corrupt a database – not because you’d need to do it, or because SQL Server has some kind of vulnerability. I just wanted to show you how SQL Server reacts when it finds corruption in a data file, why you should check your databases for CHECKSUM settings, and…

I’m just saying it’s valid T-SQL syntax, that’s all.

Last Updated February 23, 2017

Brent Ozar

Humor

Bad idea #1 Bad idea #2 Bad idea #3

Let’s Corrupt a SQL Server Database Together, Part 1: Clustered Indexes

Last Updated February 9, 2019

Brent Ozar

CHECKDB and Corruption

Hold my beer. Transact-SQL CREATE DATABASE [50Ways]; GO ALTER DATABASE [50Ways] SET PAGE_VERIFY NONE; /* Normally a bad idea */ GO USE [50Ways]; GO CREATE TABLE [dbo].[ToLeaveYourLover]([Way] VARCHAR(50)); GO INSERT INTO [dbo].[ToLeaveYourLover]([Way]) VALUES ('Slip out the back, Jack'), ('Make a new plan, Stan'), ('Hop on the bus, Gus'), ('Drop off the key, Lee') GO SELECT…

It’s now easier to read the BrentOzar.com archives by category.

Last Updated February 20, 2017

Brent Ozar

Company News

With fifteen years of blog posts, we’d accumulated a lot of junk around here. “Did I really write a blog post about buying pantyhose for turtles?” Recently we cleaned out a lot of the trash – old personal posts about boring stuff – and categorized the remaining ~2k posts to make it easier to find…

Guess the SQL Server 2017 Release Date Contest

Last Updated October 1, 2017

Brent Ozar

SQL Server 2017

286

They used to release doves, but that’s so John Woo We’ve been doing this a while now, and time to kick it off again. Leave one – and only one – comment here with your guess of the date. If you leave multiple comments, only the first/earliest one is going to count. “The date” is…

The Blog Posts You Loved to Talk About: Top-Commented Posts

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Brent Ozar

SQL Server

In WordPress, I happened to sort our posts on the comment count column and got a huge laugh. I figured you’d like to see this list too, dear reader: 20. SQL Server 2014 Standard Edition Sucks, and It’s All Your Fault – 137 comments 19. How to Set Up Standard Edition Always On Availability Groups…

A Tourist’s Guide to the sp_Blitz Source Code, Part 1: The Big Picture

Last Updated November 16, 2017

Brent Ozar

First Responder Kit, sp_Blitz

sp_Blitz is our open source free SQL Server health check script. From a really high level, here’s what it does: Create #BlitzResult, a temp table to hold its output Check something on your SQL Server, and if it’s found, insert a row into #BlitzResult Check something else, and insert a row if it’s found Do that…

SQL Server DBA’s Guide to the Gitlab Outage

Last Updated February 2, 2017

Brent Ozar

SQL Server

This week, developer tools company GitLab had a serious database outage. The short story: An admin was trying to set up replication The site had an unusual load spike, causing replication to get behind While struggling with troubleshooting, the admin made a lot of changes After hours of work, the admin accidentally deleted the production…

Always On Availability Groups Now Supported in Google Compute Engine

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Brent Ozar

Always On Availability Groups, Cloud Computing, Google Compute Engine

I’m excited to finally be able to talk about something Erik, Tara, and I have been working on for the last few months. Here in the SQL Server community, when I mention cloud, you probably think of two companies: Microsoft and Amazon. We’ve been blogging about SQL in AWS for years, and Microsoft throws a…

Updating the Stack Overflow Demo Database

Last Updated January 26, 2017

Brent Ozar

SQL Server

StackOverflow.com shares your questions, answers, comments, votes, users, badges, etc by doing a public data dump that you can download via BitTorrent. I take that data, and I turn it into a SQL Server database that you can query. It’s so much better than the Microsoft sample databases because: It’s just a handful of easily-understood tables It has…

What Do You Wanna Know About Storage?

Last Updated February 14, 2017

Brent Ozar

Storage

The Great Hardware Robbery of 2016 During Dell DBA Days 2016, we got to hang out with Doug Bernhardt of Dell’s storage team. He’s the guy who publishes Dell’s SQL Server documentation, builds their Fast Track reference architectures, and gets to play with all kinds of cool toys. Doug emailed us and asked: Is there any…

When Always On Isn’t: Handling Outages in Your Application

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Brent Ozar

Always On Availability Groups, Stack Overflow

Today’s brief Stack Overflow outage reminded me of something I’ve always wanted to blog about: Stack Overflow is in limp-home mode There’s a gray bar across the top that says, “This site is currently in read-only mode; we’ll return with full functionality soon.” That’s not a hidden feature of Always On Availability Groups. Rather, it’s a…

The 2017 Data Professional Salary Survey Results

Last Updated December 9, 2017

Brent Ozar

Professional Development, Salary

We asked to see your papers, and 2,898 people from 66 countries answered. Download the raw data in Excel, and you can slice and dice by country, years of experience, whether you manage staff or not, education, and more. Community bloggers have already started to analyze the results: Analyzing Salary with Power BI by Cláudio Silva – He…